stephan huller

But the point once again that since Christians are certain to have existed at the time of Galen therefore it is not impossible or unlikely that he would have referenced them. I don't know how else to properly answer the original question. The point of this exercise for mountainman is to question the tradition associated with Galen because he wants to disprove the existence of Christianity. That doesn't work at all. It's just one of those 60 - 40 probabilities.

aa5874

Julian did not recognise the TF or recognised the TF was an obvious forgery in the existing "Against the Galileans".

Presumptions about what may have or may not have been written are really of no value.

Let us deal with what is written.

Julian challenged those who believed the story of the Galileans to show that well know authors mentioned Jesus and Paul which implies he knew of none.

Now, based on Jesus cult writers, there were people called Christians who did NOT believe the Jesus story.

The word 'Christ' was NOT originally related to Jesus and PREDATED the Jesus story and cult.

One cannot presume that all Christians were associated with the Jesus cult when the word Christian was derived from the Greek word meaning 'Anointed'.

In the time Galen, Theophilus of Antioch and Athenagoras of Athens were called Christians yet they never mentioned Jesus or that Jesus was the Savior and Christ.

mountainman

The OP is quite simple. Examine the extant literature attributed to Galen (five instances have been listed above) for any references to "Christians". Discuss the possibility that these references would have been derived from the hand of Galen in the 2nd century or whether they have made their way into the manuscript tradition in their transmission to the present day.


This is not the point of the exercise at all. I want to be able to find some significant references to the existence and characteristics of Christians from non Christian sources prior to the "legalisation" of the "nation of Christians".

Galen is on this list.

Dont you appreciate the "TF" characteristics of the "Testimonium Galenium" ?

mountainman

Sometimes discussion can prompt such a question to arise.

The question seems to need to relate to forgery. Everyone here is IMO strolling nonchalantly through a mine-field of forgeries. Everyone admits there was a lot of forgery going on throughout the centuries from the origins of the Christian Greek Bible and all the other Bishop to Bishops Communications and Letters etc etc etc. Everyone is strolling through the century of forgeries following the carrot of the transcendental "lost original" copied perfectly to the present day. Somehow the odds of the forgeries are being swept under the carpet of consensus, and they are treated as exceptions rather than the norm.


In some of the Bayes Theorem demos I have seen an example of probability of flipping three coins, one of which is biased and always gives "heads". This seems one possible way to factor in forgery to our expectations, but as to the detailed specifications of a general question, or example, I have not got much further.

Thanks for asking.


At the moment the question is whether Galen mentions Christians.

I have collated five references above, one of which resembles the "TF", three of which involve references to "Moses and Christ" as a pair, and a final one which seems to be recognised as "sheer historical nonsense".

Toto

But we don't see these TF characteristics. Galen does not support Christian dogma, and the quotes do not fit into any pattern of Christian interpolations. The quotes are not the sort of obviously out of place comments that a pagan would never say, as the TF is full of statements that a Jew like Josephus would never say.

You have yet to come up with a theory of forgeries that would allow you to separate the valid parts from the bogus parts. Until you do this, there's no point to your continuing to point out that there be forgeries in Christian history.

mountainman

Here is the extract ...

Are these Christians not really admirable and perfectly virtuous?

Is this not a glowing reference to Christians?



That was partly an aside to J-D regarding where Bayes Theorem might be used.

Toto

That is not what the TF consists of. Where is there anything in the TF that consists of glowing references to Christians?

We know the TF is an interpolation because it contains phrases that a Jew would never have written. It contains ideas and language that fit Eusebius' theological concerns.

The passages from Galen are different. There is nothing in what Galen wrote that could never have been written by a pagan, and nothing that supports Christian theology.

Christians might be nice people, but that is an observation that a pagan who thought their religion was false could easily have made.

My point still stands.

mountainman

The TF represents a glowing reference to Jesus H Christ. The cited reference found in a late Arabic translation of Galen is a glowing reference to Christians.

But the major problem with it was pointed out at post #16. The references cited as 3 and 4 in the OP (known only via Arabic manuscripts) seem to resolve not to the books of Galen, but to a (lost) "Life of Galen" which seems to have been written in the late 6th century by John the Grammarian of Alexandria.

This leaves the first two references in the OP, both from "De differentiis pulsuum" (=On the pulse):

... in order that one should not at the very beginning, as if one had come into the school of Moses and Christ, hear talk of undemonstrated laws, and that where it is least appropriate. [ii, 4]

and


One might more easily teach novelties to the followers of Moses and Christ than to the physicians and philosophers who cling fast to their schools [iii, 3]

These two references appear to be the only references to the Chrestians Christians in the works of Galen. If they were genuine, would we not have expected him to have given us a fuller account of them [the followers of Chrest Christ] somewhere?

Galenic Corpus

mountainman

What do you mean precisely by this last statement? Hypotheses about the manuscript and textual evidence are of value. In fact they are essential because they must be expressed if called upon to do so.

Now we may make the hypothesis that the words we read from evidence of the books were those words written in the 5th century by the Despotic Doctor of the Church, the Refuter of those Terrible LIES of the academic Emperor Julian, the "Seal of the Fathers", the murder terrorist boss pyromaniac scumbag, nephew of Uncle Despotic Theophilus (who may have been worse), CYRIL of downtown Alexandria.

We may make the further hypothesis that quite uncharacteristically in the quote out of "Contra Julian" the author Cyril is telling the truth and presenting the statements of Julian, out of the lost (DESTROYED) "Against the Galilaeans".

You appear to be taking these hypotheses to be provisionally true.




Again hypotheses about what may have or may not have been written, are necessary since we are not dealing directly with what Julian actually said but with what Cyril claims to be what Julian actually said. The hypothesis that Cyril omitted everything that was really incriminating to the "Church Business and Prestige" of the 5th century is quite attractive. His job was to refute the "LIES of Julian".


To deal with evidence we must make hypotheses.

We need to be aware of these hypotheses.

Arguments often occur because of disagreement with these hypotheses.

Often the hypotheses are unstated.

When they are made explicit, hypotheses about the evidence are the driving intellectual force behind the process of formulating theories in the field of ancient history in order to arrive at "hypothetical" theoretical conclusions.

The "hypothetical" theoretical conclusion that the "TF" was written by Josephus in the 1st century is held by certain parties, while other parties look to Eusebius in the 4th century. Your "hypothetical" theoretical conclusion that the "TF" was written after c.360 CE is IMO quite viable, as are theories extending the date to even perhaps after Photius in the 9th century.

Here is a general schema for what I have described above.




(1)Evidence Items are registered
E1, E2, E3, ..., En

(2) For each evidence item
hypotheses are formulated;
P1, P2, P3, ..., Pn

(3) General hypotheses are added
GP1, GP2, GP3, ..., GPn

(4) All hypotheses become INPUT
to the "Black Box" of the Theory Generator

(5) Theoretical Conclusions are OUTPUT
C1, C2, C3, ..., Cn

mountainman

Does anyone happen to know how to search out the manuscript tradition for Galen's book "De differentiis pulsuum" (On the pulse)?

What are the oldest copies?

I read that Galen was retranslated to Greek (presumably from the Latin) in the 16th century by those who improved Galen's knowledge in order that the coherency of his medical knowledge could be better understood. (Medical knowledge took a very backward step for over a millennium with the late 4th century commissioning the two Christian stooge medical saints, Cosmas and Damian.)